Many patients have ideas that make them suspicious of those about them; these may relate to the patients, but more frequently to the attendants and physicians, and they may arise from delusions, hallucinations or illusions. This class of patients is apt to be morose, cross, and irritable; they sit brooding over their fancied wrongs; repulse advances and friendly intercourse; they refuse to employ themselves, and do not respond willingly to the requirements of the attendants. Our most trifling and unmeaning acts may give rise to the most intense suspicions and hatred. A look, a shrug of the shoulder, the manner of shaking the head, a cough, the squeaking of our boots, are frequently enough to arouse, these feelings. Suspicious patients often think they are the subjects of ridicule; that their thoughts are read and proclaimed to the ward; that their virtue, truth, or honor is called in question, and the accusations openly told to others, or that they are called vile and insulting names. They often have delusions of conspiracy to do them or their families harm, and connect the attendants and physicians with them, thinking, as they keep them locked in the asylum, they are associated in the conspiracy. Sometimes these patients think themselves some great persons, perhaps that they are a member of the Deity, or a ruler, or prophet, or that they have some great mission to perform, and that they are deprived of their rights, or their work interfered with, by being kept in the asylum, and that those in authority are imprisoning and persecuting them. Such persons may be, on account of their fancied wrongs, very suspicious, and even violent towards those who care for them. Other patients have suspicions and fears of bodily harm. They may think they are to be tortured, that they are to be burned alive, or that some one is trying to kill them. To-day, as I wrote these lines, a patient told me she did not sleep last night for fear the night-watch would kill her--saying that God told her the watch was armed with a knife for that purpose, and she threatened homicidal violence in defending herself. Many patients mistake ordinary sensations of pain and bodily discomfort, and have delusions that they are being injured. The feelings of dyspepsia may make patients think they have been poisoned; ordinary pains or aches, that they have been shot, stabbed, or pounded; women may, for some such causes, think they have been violated or are pregnant. Peculiar sensations of various kinds may make patients think some one is affecting them by electricity or mesmerizing them. It is very easy to trace from such ideas of persecution and suspicion, the origin of homicidal, suicidal, incendiary and other violent tendencies and acts.